I'm populating a HTML drop down menu using CGI's popup_menu method. The popup_menu method says you can generate the drop down menu with a Hash Reference. I believe I have a Hash Reference generated from a call to a DB but I'm getting "HASH(0xa278214)" instead of my desired output. I searched the Perl Monks archive and the net but couldn't figure it out.

What am I doing wrong with this code?
#!/usr/bin/perl -wT

use DBI;
use strict;
use CGI;
use CGI::Carp qw(fatalsToBrowser);
use Data::Dumper;

my $cgi = CGI->new();  # Create new CGI object.

my $database = "db";
my $db_server = "localhost";
my $user = "user";
my $password = "pass";

my $dbh = DBI->connect("DBI:mysql:$database;host=$db_server", $user,
$password) or die $DBI::errstr;

my $authorSQL = "SELECT idAuthor, Author FROM Author ORDER BY Author";

my $hash_ref = $dbh->selectall_hashref($authorSQL, "idAuthor");

print $cgi->header;
print $cgi->start_form;
print Dumper($hash_ref);

print $cgi->popup_menu(-name=>'menu_name',
                  -values=>[$hash_ref]);

print $cgi->end_form;

[download]
Here's my HTML output from the code above
<form method="post" action="/cgi-bin/addlocation.pl" enctype="multipar
+t/form-data">
$VAR1 = {
          '1' => {
                   'Author' => 'Mike',
                   'idAuthor' => '1'
                 },
          '2' => {
                   'Author' => 'Cecil',
                   'idAuthor' => '2'
                 }
        };
<select name="menu_name" tabindex="1">
<option value="HASH(0xa278214)">HASH(0xa278214)</option>
</select><div></div></form>

[download]
As you can see from Data::Dumper, I need the drop down menu to show "Mike" and "Cecil" with their values 1 and 2 respectively.

In reply to CGI's "popup_menu" Using Hash Reference by awohld

Title:
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